The obsessives over at Digital Foundry, who do this kind of thing for a living, have compared the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Final Fantasy XIII in agonising detail. The results? Not so good for 360 owners.

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While acknowledging that the most important thing - that game itself is the same (of course) - and that in some instances cinematic sequences are better than expected, in many other areas the 360 version "isn't anywhere near as impressive as it is on PlayStation 3".

Making things worse is DF's assertion that it didn't have to be this way; that much of the 360 version's (relatively) poor performance in CGI sequences is down to "amateurish" video encoding on the part of Square Enix, with around 1GB of storage space left unused on two of the game's three discs that could have been put to work improving the look of the game's cutscenes.

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Things aren't all bad for the 360 version. Digital Foundry notes that the game's framerate is consistently smoother on Microsoft's console, the 360 better able to stick to the game's target of 30 frames per second than the PS3.

Words can of course only describe so much, so for the full details on the breakdown and a big collection of comparative galleries and in-game clips, hit the link below.